March 7, 2017
(NPR) – Thomas Starzl, the doctor who pioneered liver transplant surgery, has died at the age of 90. In an announcement on its website, the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center said Starzl died peacefully at his home on Saturday. “His … Read More
February 24, 2017
(STAT News) – Jeantine Lunshof insists she is not the “ethics police.” It says so on the door to her closet-sized office at Harvard. She doesn’t find reasons to reflexively shut down experiments. She doesn’t snoop around for deviations from … Read More
February 22, 2017
Studies in Christian Ethics has a new article available online by subscription only. “Ethics, Human Oocytes and the Teleology of the Body: An Appreciation of Gilbert Meilaender’s Work” by Paul Lauritzen
February 20, 2017
(The Guardian) – Norma McCorvey, who was just 22 years old when she became better known as Jane Roe in the landmark 1973 supreme court case Roe v Wade, has died aged 69 in her home state of Texas. Her … Read More
February 8, 2017
(Nature) – Oliver Smithies had a habit of inventing ways to do the experiments he wanted to do, and crafted tools that are now used widely in biology. He won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2007 for … Read More
February 6, 2017
(The Atlantic) – Neil Gorsuch, President Trump’s pick for the U.S. Supreme Court, is deeply interested in matters of life and death. His most lasting legacy from his time on the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals is likely Hobby Lobby … Read More
January 30, 2017
(The Australian) – Mackay-Sim has done very valuable work on the use of nasal stem cells in spinal cord injury. He was the pioneer in this country in the use of adult stem cells and proved that they were safe … Read More
January 17, 2017
(New York Times) – The breakthrough sidestepped the embryo controversy, offering researchers an unlimited supply of stem cells. Dr. Yamanaka shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for reprogramming mature cells into what are now called induced pluripotent … Read More
January 5, 2017
(NPR) – Desmond Tutu, South Africa’s former Anglican archbishop and a Nobel Peace Prize laureate, recently celebrated his 85th birthday with an interesting message: He wants the option of an assisted death. Tutu has largely retired from public life, but … Read More
December 5, 2016
(The Guardian) – The voluntary euthanasia advocate Philip Nitschke has launched a “militant” campaign to push for unrestricted adult access to a peaceful death. Nitschke announced the launch of Exit Action on Sunday morning, describing the new organisation as a … Read More
October 27, 2016
(JAMA) – As part of his 1984 doctoral thesis, Church developed and described the first direct DNA sequencing method that became the precursor to modern-day next-generation sequencing approaches. Church was involved in launching the Human Genome Project and received 1 … Read More
October 10, 2016
(The Washington Post) – Now, as I turn 85 Friday, with my life closer to its end than its beginning, I wish to help give people dignity in dying. Just as I have argued firmly for compassion and fairness in … Read More
October 4, 2016
(Voices in Bioethics) – Tom Beauchamp, PhD, has been a principle pioneer in the field of bioethics. As a young philosophy professor at Georgetown, he created the first applied ethics program in the United States. In 1975, he was recruited … Read More
October 3, 2016
(The Washington Post) – Japanese biologist Yoshinori Ohsumi was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in medicine on Monday for discovering and elucidating a key mechanism in our body’s defense system that involves degrading and recycling parts of cells. Known as autophagy, this … Read More
September 6, 2016
(CNN) – The recipient of the world’s first face transplant, Isabelle Dinoire, has died, according to French doctors. A statement released by Amiens Hospital, which performed the ground-breaking procedure in November 2005, said Dinoire died on April 22, 2016 “following … Read More
August 22, 2016
(STAT News) – There are few people in the field of global public health so well-known that you merely need to utter two initials to evoke instant recognition. But to raise in conversation Dr. Donald Ainslee Henderson, the man who … Read More
August 19, 2016
(STAT News) – Don’t let Vera Sharav fool you. A former librarian, she’s diminutive and refined, partial to pearls, classical music, and ballet. But she’s also a streetfighter: one of the most effective and passionate — some would say extreme … Read More
July 18, 2016
(The Globe and Mail) – A pioneer in nursing ethics who developed an influential theory of caring, Sister Simone Roach was credited for establishing the first code of ethics for nurses in Canada and inspiring generations of nurses. In 1980, … Read More
July 11, 2016
(The Washington Post) – Irving Gottesman, a psychologist whose groundbreaking studies of twins in the 1960s helped reveal a genetic link to schizophrenia, a finding that upended the prevailing but deeply flawed view of the disorder as a consequence of … Read More
July 5, 2016
(Washington Post) – Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, the memory keeper for victims of Nazi persecution, and a Nobel laureate who used his moral authority to force attention on atrocities around the world, died July 2 at his home in New York. … Read More
June 21, 2016
(STAT News) – A scathing indictment of the ethics of medical research, published 50 years ago today, sparked a firestorm of controversy in the medical community and led to an overhaul of the rules of research involving humans. The fact … Read More
June 13, 2016
(Boston Globe) – Dennis McCullough, a pioneer of the “slow medicine” movement, which advocates palliative care over invasive regimens for older patients suffering from the inevitable and irreversible decline of aging, died Friday in Bar Harbor, Maine. He was 72. … Read More
May 10, 2016
The Journal of Medicine & Philosophy (vol. 41, no. 2, 2016) is available online by subscription only. Articles include: “Dignity, Health, and Membership: Who Counts as One of Us?” by Bryan C. Pilkington “Strange Bedfellows? Common Ground on the Moral Status … Read More
May 9, 2016
(Yahoo!) – Lucy Liu wants everyone to know that there isn’t one right way to become a mother. She has teamed up with Tylenol for the #HowWeFamily campaign, which aims to bring awareness about the fluid concepts of family and motherhood. Her first … Read More
April 27, 2016
(Nature) – The itinerant lifestyle doesn’t seem to have hampered the microbiologist as she has carefully dissected the systems by which bacteria control their genomes. Charpentier is now acknowledged as one of the key inventors of the gene-editing technology known … Read More
